An Arabic-English Lexicon: Derived from the Best and the Most Copious Eastern Sources
By Edward William Lane
This is the Text Version of Lane, An Arabic English Lexicon converted into text from:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License (Details can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/
The preface of this work was extracted from an online version of Lane’s Lexicon available at:
http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=8yswAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PR5
This lexicon was converted to text from above resources by Naveed Ul Islam.
Please report errors and your suggestions to 
Lane Lexicon 
Salam Alaykum,
I would like to know, is there any way in which other famous, but shorter lexicons, such as th ones from J.G. Hava, or Hans Wehr can also be converted into text format, and if so what is the procedure and how long would it take?
Salam,
All the scanned work if not available as text has to be typed first. Lane’s Lexicon was entered by Perseus Digital Library (University of Chicago) funded by US Department of Education. But they did not make it available as text. I spent a lot of time and extracted the text from the Lane’s Lexicon on their site.
Though there are some Arabic OCR software. I have tested Abby Fine Read Pro 11 (Arabic) but did not work well even with a scanned resolution of 600 DPI. There is another software Sakhr. It is claimed to be the best but I have not tested it as I have not been able to contact them so far.
Do you fee that Lane is insufficient or do you feel difficulty in finding words in it? Let me know and I will try to address.
Wa Salam.
I guess I need advice on how to find the exact words or phrases on the .txt file, since notepad makes a distinction between words with and without diacritics, and sometimes it is difficult to tell how the word that is needed has been typed.
Of course, MS Word is better in this respect from my experience, but it takes a very long time to load, and in one case it said that the page limit for documents had been breached when I tried to copy from .txt to .doc format.
If there is something I am missing, please inform all the readers so that more benefot may be derived from this work.
Salam,
I have just prepared a vowel stripped version of Lane’s Lexicon. For more details please see the Download Updates page
https://lanelexicon.com/updates/
In fact I had the similar issue and tried and thought of several different ways to resolve it. I believe that the text version without tashkeel (vowel signs) should work much better for searching.
Here are some instructions that might make it even easier.
(1) Download and install the BabelPad from http://www.babelstone.co.uk/software/babelpad.html
(2) Unzip and open the text file in the BabelPad text editor.
(3) Press Control + F on the keyboard to bring up the “Find and Replace” window
(4) If you are searching for the root word then after typing the root word in the “Find What” field, select the radio button, “Start of the Line” from the Line Boundary and “Whole word” radio button from the “Word Boundary” options.
(5) Click Find next
It should require a maximum of 1-3 clicks on “Find What” button
(6) If you are searching for other than root words than let both the Line Boundary and Word Boundary remain at the “Any” and just click search.
(7) If you would like to know that how many matching words are in search results then just click the Count button in the Find and Replace window.
I hope that it should help. If you have any questions, please ask here or send an email.
Salam Alaykum,
The vowel stripped version helps a lot. Regarding the other lexicons (such as Hans Wehr or J.G. Hava and other lexicons found at the Arabic Almanac site) I guess there is no plan at the moment to convert these to text.
I am just asking in order to know, since as you know, other lexicons are needed sometimes in order to fill gaps in Lane’s Lexicon. In any case, the conversion of Lane’s into text is a very beneficial job from your side.
Thanks sir for this notable work
السلام علبكم
جلزاك الله خبرا كثيرا
many many thanx to you for doing this marvelous work!!! :). It will help a lot to the students like me and others. thank you again.
I am a developer and wishing to make a software based on your text, a fully searchable Arabic to English dictionary. For that, I need your help. Do you have this text available in some format like xml or database where one field contains the root word and other contains the meanings and other stuff. I hope you got my point.
Salam,
Yes, I have XML but text files have been updated and XML FILES HAVE NOT BEEN UPDATED.
When I say updated it means correction of errors and spellings etc.
I will send you an email with my contact information.
Regards
Hello Naveed, how are you? And thank you for this wonderful work. I would like to create StarDict, XDXF, MDict, CSV-File, AardDict…version of the lane dictionary (as this is my speciality, I am part of the DictionaryForMIDs project).
I think this would be a great thing for people who might be interested in such dictionary file formats. As far as I am concerned, this would help me to translate arabic words straight from my Android ebook readers (such as FBReader) using for instance GoldenDict, MDict, BlueDict and so on.
And the dictionary files could be sent to you and you’ll also host them here. We could also create dicts for both Version1 and 2. But for that I need the xml files.
I tried and downloaded them from perseus but the big problem is I don’t know anything about TEI xml format and I could not transliterate the nasty latin transcriptions of the arabic letters, back to their original arabic.
Regards
Hello,
I can help you with the XML files but I need to fully understand what you would like to do with these.
Regards,
Naveed
My little knowledge about computer demands that I may request for your advice in this behalf. Wassalaam. Sarmad
Hi Naveed;
Thank you for the work you’ve done. I am starting to learn Arabic, so I do not know how I am supposed to use the lexicon. Hasn’t it been used by academic research yet? Regarding declension, the best resource I’ve found so far is https://en.wiktionary.org. Yet, there are few explanations regarding differences in the use of the different broken plurals and the like.
Also, I’d like to know about other similar projects that you are doing.
Hope to hear news soon.
Thank you in advance.
Hello, Just to tell you that I have successfully converted the Lane Lexicon that I took from the enhanced version provided by Alpheios Project, to different popular dictionary formats as follows:
Aard2 Slob (*.slob)
MDict (*.mdx | *.mdd)
Dictd (*.dict.dz)
XDXF (*.xdxf)
Babylon (*.bgl)
Comma-Separated-Value (*.csv)
StarDict (*.ifo | *.idx | *.dict.dz)
head to http://abu-dju.github.io/ for more information.
Thank you so much for the information.
@Abu-Djuwairiyyah Kareem Ibn Muhammad
Thank you so much!
Jazakumullahu khayran!!
Excellent work. Easy to search a word. I wish it could be done for Taj ul Uroos as well.
If you meant that Taj Ul Aroos to be in text format, then it is available. If you cannot find it online, I can send it over or arrange alternative. Let me know.